V.Y. Mudimbe

V. Y. Mudimbe: Thoughts About the Social Sciences in Africa. — In Mudimbe’s writings, we come upon a discourse that can be read in terms of otherness and difference but that also seeks to adjust antagonistic sensitivities in a game of reversals strongly influenced by scientific reminiscences. The “I” is but this permutation, this infinite substitution, of quotations on Orpheus’s lyre. In this process, speech, connected to a sort of rare encyclopedia, is tinkered out of the remnants of conflicting memories. Mudimbe tirelessly inquires into the tricks of discourse, language traps and the ideological presuppositions of the social sciences by inviting us to move beyond “founding binarisms”. Mots-clés/